Growing up in smallish-town Yorkshire as I did, you knew when you were a weirdo. For a start, groups of strangers would ask, “What have you come as?” or “I like your trousers, did you win them?” when you strolled into the pub wearing purple harem pants, zebra-skin clogs and your mother’s bowler hat, you would brush off their fancy-dress jeers, your face full of blushing thunder, sort of loving the attention a bit.

And then, on your way home, another group of lads would wind down their car windows and shout “FASHION VICTIM!” as you wobbled along the pavement of the A19 in your striped mammalian shoes. And you’d think, all right, I’m getting a bit tired of this now, I’ll just have to hold it in until I can move to the big city, where nobody will care if I’m a weirdo. And so I did.

But even the big cities aren’t safe any more. Readers, an insidious perversion called normality is on the rise, and the normality perverts are coming for all of us. They want us to look the same, dress the same, and stare into the camera with our hollow, smiling eyes.

The latest Gap ad campaign features the slogan “Dress Normal”, just in case the avant garde freakishness of their beige chinos and chunky knits had been scaring away the masses. The clothes in these ads are modelled by famous people who usually look quite interesting, for example Anjelica Huston, but who have been restyled in clothes so boring that they were apparently designed with the sole intention of making one never stand out in a crowd again. There are only two groups of people who could benefit from taking the trend they’re calling normcore to these dizzying heights: celebrities having a midlife crisis and serial killers on the run.

It’s the great blandness of our times. It’s David Cameron abstaining from the recent Commons vote on Palestine – you see more controversial results when an old lady takes a baked alaska out of a freezer on The Great British Bake Off. It’s as if our prime minister has become some kind of unelected figurehead who can’t be seen to have an actual opinion on a difficult topic – which is ironic, since, given the hung parliament that put him where he is today, he sort of is.

Then there’s Ed Miliband, who could seize the opportunity to launch a real political alternative, given the surge of smaller parties like the Greens and Ukip. Instead, we’ve got a Labour party that looks at the work of the Coalition, and says er, yeah, well, we’d probably have done that too, tbh, LOL. No wonder some people are excited by Russell Brand’s amorphous plans for a revolution – at least he points out that the economic inequalities we are repeatedly told are inevitable actually ceased to be normal years ago.

In Grayson Perry’s new TV series, he argues that “normal” and “natural” are the two most dangerous words of our age, and I think he’s right. Even my daughter’s nursery wants three-year-olds to wear a grey uniform, as if you should have got over that whole bright colours and joie de vivre thing by two and a half at least. I send her there in her own bright clothes and a big old smile, regardless, because there are more important battles to fight with a toddler at 8am, before setting off on foot, past the luxury flats being built along the canal, with their shiny glass, clean lines and the death of the local soul.

The truth, though, is that I’m writing this in a pair of cords from the very same high street retailer I just slagged off. And I have worn black every day for the last year, even though I always say it isn’t me.

In fact, last weekend, having got a few early nights in, I decided to go round the high street to “make a start on the Christmas shopping”, like some kind of consumerist wet dream. Perhaps this is really my own midlife crisis, approaching on tiptoe. It turns out that age has brought diminishing returns on my weirdness. I wonder if the normality pervert might actually be me.